Thursday, October 8, 2026

@leevalueroach Sep 4 3 clicks

Lee Roach on X

Rayonier $RYN owns 4,003,000 acres across eleven states. Here's what happens when you value everything else on the balance sheet and subtract it. Enterprise value is $7.64B. Market cap $6.19B plus $1.45B of net debt. Now take out the pieces that aren't dirt: Six sawmills and a plywood mill, $1.0B. Cross-checked two ways. Replacement cost runs ~$700/MBF on 1,155 MMBF of capacity. Mid-cycle EBITDA of $175M at 6x gets you the same place. Three master-planned communities, $482M. Wildlight north of Jacksonville, Heartwood next to Hyundai's $7.59B plant in Georgia, Chenal Valley in Little Rock at 70% sold out. DCF'd at 12%. The rural land program, $650M. They sold 7,490 acres at $5,439 last quarter against a portfolio the market marks at $1,447. That 3.7x spread on ~30,000 acres a year, decayed and discounted over a 13-year runway. Solar options on 77,000 acres, $125M at a 25% conversion assumption. Carbon storage across 154,000 acres, $80M. Smackover lithium, $30M. Real geology, ten cents a share. The below-market debt mark, $130M, audited on the balance sheet. That leaves $5.14B for the timberland. Now subtract the trees. 188M tons of standing merchantable inventory at current TimberMart-South stumpage, with pine sawtimber at $23.34/ton and pulpwood at $5.40, is $3.57B. Residual: $1.57B of bare land across 4,003,000 acres. $393 an acre. Cutover land in the South, meaning ground that was just harvested with zero merchantable timber on it, transacts between $1,200 and $1,800. Three marks you can check yourself: In August the company sold 36,000 Washington acres at $4,028 and bought 57,000 Texas and Alabama acres at $2,561. Same month, same management. They paid 77% more than the market credits them for what they already own. Morgan Stanley's fairness opinion produced $47.55 to $55.80 on a DCF and $20.85 to $25.20 on trading comps in the same document. The stock is at $20.81. That gap is institutional cost of capital at 7% versus public equity demanding 9 to 10%, applied to an asset with thirty-year cash flows. Management bought back 4.9M shares for $103.5M in H1 and repaid a $200M term loan with cash rather than refinance it. I built the whole thing a second way, from transaction comps by state instead of tons and dirt. $31.80 versus $31.66. Bear case marks the entire South at $1,700/acre, puts the mills at a trough multiple, converts solar at 15%, and still lands at $24.74. Every case sits above the current price. One caveat I'll state myself: the $393 assumes rural HBU is a separate asset. Treat it as embedded in land value instead and you get $555. Still under cutover. The conclusion holds either way. Full work, every input shown, plus the part about the debt structure that I think almost nobody is modeling, linked below.